We Shall Overcomb: Music as Protest at the Women’s March

Musicians played a role at the center of the Women’s March on Washington this past weekend, with main stage speeches by Alicia Keys and a many-fucks-given Madonna, performances including Janelle Monáe and Amber Coffman, and an after-party featuring Sleater-Kinney and the National. But, out in the March itself, music functioned in many other capacities, often having less to do with protest songs or individual statements so much as a tool for protest itself, building on strategies as varied as those marching.

Though plenty have pointed out and questioned the lack of contemporary protest music (yet)—including a whole Tumblr dedicated to such anti-trend pieces—a preliminary survey of events around the Women’s Marches and Donald Trump’s inauguration suggest that music’s relationship to dissent has perhaps merely evolved. Already, music has played a vibrant part in the emergence of the Black Lives Matters movement. Now that Trump has taken office, it’s more likely that musicians will respond in real time with songs and performances, but the connections between music and street action from everyday citizens remain rich. With amplification systems often banned from marches, it opens up a wealth of creative possibilities for the use of sound and music, but it’s most likely not going to come from those with access to a microphone. This point is underscored by the viral success of MILCK’s original composition “I Can’t Keep Quiet,” which the Los Angeles-based musician rehearsed with collaborators online before staging flash mob-style performances throughout the Washington march.

With many of the estimated half-million attendees in D.C. unable to see or hear official activity on the big stage, varieties of politicized noise fought against sirens, bullhorns, and the chaotic murmur of the crowd. Often, the sonic protest took the form of pure waves of cheers, passing down the avenues with no discernible source. Connected by the usual bucket drumming and a number of specific chants, the musical approaches ranged widely in Washington and elsewhere, suggesting an expanding playbook that might be modified and called from in the next four years. Considered as a form of improvised music, the often cathartic chants are now being transcribed by Noriko Manabe, from classics (“The people united will never be defeated!”) to more current barbs (“Small hands, small feet, all he does is tweet, tweet, tweet”). Like tweets going viral, spontaneous call-and-responses with simple rhythms emerged and spread. “Science is a thing,” ran one in the outskirts of the D.C. march, rippling through the crowd. Soon, a reply emerged on the off-beats: “It’s real!”

Music turned up in so many different ways this past weekend, each providing its own type of energy, from solidarity to disruption. Queer dance parties erupted at Vice President Mike Pence’s temporary residence in a Maryland suburb, and blocked one of the inauguration entry points, creating both chaos and playful discomfort for homophobic Trump supporters. Singalongs emerged in pockets, with reports of a wide variety of material, from “Formation” call-outs to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables, the latter reverberating under a downtown Metro overpass. In New York, church bells played Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

“This machine kills fascists,” Woody Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar, a slogan that once got him barred from the Capitol Building. “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender,” Guthrie’s occasional musical partner Pete Seeger inked on his banjo in a non-violent iteration. A lifetime after Guthrie, with all kinds of new potential fascist-killing machines, varieties of musical protest have grown through expanding media channels and evolving cultural sensibilities, now disseminated by the same digital folk networks that simultaneously power the distribution of right-wing and racist memes.

In a New Yorker piece, “How Jokes Won the Election,” Emily Nussbaum analyzed how “jokes [became] powerful accelerants for lies.” And it is likewise humor that propels many of the more widespread musical protests. But for perhaps the same reason that musical protests might seem outdated, they also potentially offer something to transcend the dank meme economy, connecting to a rich lineage of cultural dissent.

The runaway musical mega-hit of inauguration weekend is unquestionably the video of dapper young neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting clocked by a masked black bloc protester, set to dramatic moments in songs. With a punchline so literal, there are infinite setups and payoffs, from Celine Dion to Fetty Wap, Nirvana to Bon Jovi. A @PunchedToMusic account launched to document some of them, the new subgenre bringing its own aesthetic concerns. “Unpopular opinion on these Richard Spencer videos,” WBAI DJ Jay Smooth tweeted. “I believe the right choice is to sync the punch with the snare, not the kick drum.” (RIP Vine.)

Where the protest canon once rested on a songbook grown from modified hymns, union rallying cries, and fill-in-the-blank “zipper” songs, much of music's presence at the marches came mediated by the clever reframing of pop culture, including the ghosts of protests past. While few marchers were so wide-eyed as to sing the protest standard “We Shall Overcome,” its presence made itself known in one of the more popular sign slogans: “We Shall Overcomb.”

Late in the afternoon, the Bread and Puppet Theater from Glover, Vermont—an avant-garde fixture at street actions for a half-century—finally turned onto the Mall for the last leg of the day. A miniature surrealist parade of spooky klansmen, giant birds, grotesque caricatures, a huge human-made banner-boat, and stilt-walkers, the procession was led by the troupe’s rag-tag marching band, at that particular moment playing a mostly recognizable version of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” While the sentiment of the song didn’t quite match the day, its function was less a statement than the simple tactic of channeling the natural energy of the march into recognizable momentum. Among a crowd dominated by white women, Beyoncé is a sure bet.

With a new season of protests still at its dawn, a resistance counterculture continues to shape itself, with music only one of its many available tools. Outside of marches, opportunities await for those with the right imaginations to weaponize their instruments or voices. In North Carolina last year, the Airhorn Orchestra staged over two-dozen invitationals at the Governor’s mansion to protest the HB2 bathroom bill with ecstatic untrained free jazz tooting sessions, as well as the dramatic and heartbreaking “49 Hits, then Silence” to remember the Pulse nightclub shooting. Around the world, music continues to play an unlikely launching pad for dissent, from the globally resounding punk of Russia’s Pussy Riot to the hyper-localized teenage protest hip-hop of Malian viral star Pheno S., calling out school officials for sleeping with female students.

Everywhere, music will inevitably remain a creator of community, with Trump’s comical inability to secure musical acts reading like a seemingly unified front, and by extension creating the paradoxical good vibrations of an at least temporarily unified counterculture. At the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington on the night on the inauguration, an anti-inaugural Planned Parenthood benefit featured Steve Gunn, Meg Baird, members of Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo. Between sets, on a playlist compiled with the musicians, new resistance standards rolled by: Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War,” Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as performed by kids via Numero Group’s Afterschool Special), and the never-ending scream of Yoko Ono’s “Why.” The Trump administration might not be goodformusic (or much of anything), but music will surely be good for it.

As the grand gestures of the inauguration and the Women’s Marches unfold into the nitty gritty of policy detail and continued resistance, today’s unpredictability will be answered by tomorrow’s songs and comforted by yesterday’s favorites. There will be much to protest, and much more to say. Many will make music. Where, how, who, and what remain exciting, albeit terrifying, questions.